Through a comparative study of two rural Tanzanian districts, this dissertation develops and operationalizes a schema for assessing and comparing the long-term effects of a humanitarian influx—the arrival of refugees and relief—on host communities' regimes of governmental practice. Informed by both Foucauldian and Weberian insights into power and discipline, this perspective reveals influx-related effects missed by more materialistic analyses while also integrating forced migration into discussions of citizenship, the state, and transnationalization. Over 100 villagers participated in this study along with over a 100 UN, NGO, and government employees at the village, district, regional, and national levels. The findings also rely on archival research and a formal written survey (n = 272) of civic attitudes and political culture—replicating an instrument administered in 1966—among secondary school students.; Using Mill's ‘method of difference,’ this study reveals that while the influx of Burundian and Congolese refugees has not produced the deleterious economic and environmental effects many claim, its effects on identity and perceptions of law and administrative responsibility have induced a spatialized variance in Tanzania's national regime of governmental practice. Within this new regime, refugee-affected areas' permanent residents are strengthening their normative ties to a distinctly Tanzanian population, territory, and state, even as economic and instrumental relations with and expectation for these entities become fragmented and directed towards non-state actors. In place of government bodies, international actors—refugees and aid agencies—are being insinuated into logics of causation and responsibility, creating a ‘platonic state’ that exists in the realm of virtue, ideals, and discourse. Such findings problematize understandings of the nation-state and highlight serious shortcomings in dominant approaches to administrative reform. This project ultimately calls for a more holistic and socially embedded vision of the contemporary African state.
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